Property Rights and Poverty​

Property Rights and Poverty is a new team that cleans, compiles, and learns from data on individual livelihoods in severely impoverished areas, both in the United States and abroad. Knowing that you own something - for example, that you own your prized possessions - means that your time, money, and effort in caring for those possessions will benefit you and your family. When you take out a mortgage on a house or buy a car with a car loan, you do not own those things outright, but because you are in the process of owning these things, caring for them is again important for you and your family. In contrast, when property rights are insecure, it is hard to justify spending your scarce resources on caring for things that might be taken away from you. Unfortunately, insecure property rights can mean increased poverty and worsening quality of life not just for individuals but for the communities in which they live.

One project within this team will focus on the difficulties that impoverished people often have in owning a home and the land on which their home is built. This problem stands behind severe housing insecurity on Native American reservations in the United States, for example. A second project will focus on the problem that, because many countries have legacies of making it difficult for impoverished people to own agricultural or other productive urban land, standard economic development strategies may directly exacerbate inequality. Such legacies are motivating controversial pushes for land redistribution to black South Africans and Namibians, for example. A third project will focus on how remittances - the funds that migrants are able to save and send back to friends and relatives in their home country - may help impoverished people at home to own property, start businesses, and improve their livelihoods even without government intervention. This project will most directly deal with data from Mexico.

(2) Use GIS and other skills to increase the legibility of data for our work and the policy community;

(3) Compose white papers on the breadth of property rights and poverty issues around the world;

(4) Gain experience in research design to use data to test hypotheses.

Tasks:

(1) Organize and clean newly available datasets for our use and public dissemination

(2) Pursue in-depth case studies of specific property rights conflicts in targeted locations, especially indigenous lands in the US and abroad, as well as with regard to other historically disadvantaged communities abroad

(3) Code lobbying efforts by multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations regarding the rollout of international environment, health, and safety law in developing countries